Venomized Vol. 2

Venomized is a five-issue miniseries written by Cullen Bunn with Iban Coello as lead artist, published by Marvel Comics from April 2018; it concludes and continues the "Poison-X" storyline from Venomverse and X-Men: Blue. This volume is issue #2 of the series. The story picks up right after issue #1: Venom and the X-Men return from their alien adventure to find that dozens of heroes and villains on Earth have been forcibly bonded with Klyntar symbiotes, and not one of them is happy about it. The new threat, the Poisons, live by devouring symbiote hosts with superpowers, and they see the entire Marvel Universe as their next feast. In issue #2, Spider-Man and Eddie Brock hold back for the moment at the urging of Cyclops and Magneto; the group retreats to the Xavier Institute and transfers the symbiote-infected mutants to Alchemax, where Liz Allan and Peter Parker try and fail to strip the symbiotes off. Eddie firmly opposes killing symbiotes to save hosts, and a rift opens between him and the others. Meanwhile, Demolition Man and Rage encounter a Poison squad led by Killer Thrill while evacuating civilians; the fight is deliberately drawn out just to wait for the Avengers to appear, after which the Poisons begin their conversion ritual and take down Thor and several other heroes in one stroke. On the space front, the Poison called Death reveals the true nature of the hive mind and discloses that Carnage has nearly completed the union. Elsa Bloodstone hands the Mordreth Passage to Kid Kaiju, who chooses to head straight to New York and join the fight. This volume unfolds the battlefield across multiple threads with a huge cast; it is a typical mid-event Marvel structure of "assembly—setback—counterattack," and this volume sets the stage for the turning point of the whole series.